| The ancient sorceress Medea, perhaps the most formidable, magically endowed and psychologically nuanced woman from fable, has always attracted dramatists. At no time was her story so often represented on the stage as in France during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In a period when stage works of all kinds showed a preoccupation with---and implicit moral condemnation of---the supernatural, the aberrant, and the occult, Medea was the perfect heroine to indulge a public's voracious appetite for the magical "marvellous.";Medea was the first magicienne in French opera (Lully's and Quinault's Thesee, 1675). But this singing arch-enchantress did not emerge fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus; like French opera itself, she grew out of an interweaving of a multiplicity of theatrical types: the old court ballet, French classical tragedy and machine spectacle, and Italian opera. Medea is to be found in each of these strains. By following the heroine's progress through them, one may witness, in microcosm, an evolution toward French opera.;This study's search for Medea's French operatic identity takes the form of a tragi-comedy in five acts. The first three acts explore the sources for her identifying dramatic and musical attributes: (1) "moralized" lessons, received from antiquity and updated in explicated mythographic literature and allegorical court fetes; (2) the traditions of French classical tragedy, which show her indomitability in the face of terrible inner conflicts and reversals of fortune; and (3) the spectacles of Italian opera and the French machine play, in which were displayed her celebrated "marvellous" powers that would suit so well the extravagant forms and effects cultivated in the tragedie mise en musique.;"Act Four" is devoted entirely to her music as it appears in five lyric tragedies written for the Paris Opera during the reign of Louis XIV: Thesee, 1675 (music by Lully, livret by Quinault); Medee, 1693 (M.-A. Charpentier/Thomas Corneille); Jason, ou la Toison d'or, 1696 (Collasse/J.-B. Rousseau); Medus, Roi des Medes, 1702 (Bouvard/La Grange-Chancel); and Medee, et Jason, 1713 (Salomon/the abbe Pellegrin).;Finally, we consider Medea's musical career in the "lighter" French genres of parody and satire. |
